Through the work of Pirate Wires we have drawn attention to the progress of the possible billionaire tax that threatens to make its way on to the ballot in California. It is responsible for the escape of some megasuccessful citizens from the state. In following the progress of the ballot initiative, my thought has been that what happens in Californian doesn’t stay in California. Riley Nork writes in this morning’s edition of PW:
Inspired by California’s proposed “billionaire wealth tax” (unprecedented asset seizure already prompting a multi-trillion dollar wealth flight), a measure that he recently rallied in support for, Senator Bernie Sanders has declared “hold my prune juice, we’re taking this bad boy nationwide.” The senator will reportedly unveil a new “mega tax” on America’s billionaires, with Rep. Ro Khanna unveiling a similar measure in the House, and proceeds would go towards noble causes including *checks notes* stimulus checks and increasing public school teacher pay to “at least $60k/year.” For those who said “so what” to California deciding to nuke its biggest industries with their proposal, let this be a reminder — these people have ambitions far beyond Silicon Valley, and there will be no escaping to Miami when they scale their plans nationally. But hey… destroying the American economy is a small price to pay for ensuring teachers can all get flatscreen TVs with their stimmy checks.
I had arrived at my keyboard this morning intending to note this development via Ira Stoll’s Free Beacon story “Sanders, Khanna Unveil $4.4 Trillion Tax Increase” (“New York Times campaigns against ‘gilded age’ in Wyoming”). Stoll reports (links omitted):
Sen. Bernie Sanders, socialist of Vermont, and Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California best known for trafficking in Epstein-related conspiracy theories, are pushing legislation that would impose a new 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires and use the revenue to give money to everyone earning less than $150,000 a year.
The bill, which the politicians are calling the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade, according to a letter from Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, that was released by the leftist politicians.
The March 2, 2026, letter from the two economists, on University of California, Berkeley, letterhead, advocated the tax less as a tool to raise revenue and more as a way of curbing what the economists describe as an “unprecedented level” of wealth concentration.
“Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated,” says the letter. “A billionaire wealth tax is the most direct policy tool to curb the growing concentration of wealth among the billionaire class in the United States.”
Stoll doesn’t mention the California connection, if any, to the wealth tax. It’s in the water these people drink. Rather, he observes the public-relations hand lent to the thesis of the tax by…the New York Times:
Almost as if coordinated, the New York Times unleashed a four-byline project about what it called “America’s New Gilded Age.” The Times story, which was published as a news article, hit nearly the same theme as the Sanders and Khanna press release. “One of the central quandaries the country now faces is how to govern in an era when such vast wealth both controls a large part of the economy and is increasingly used to access political power,” said—OK, you guess, was that from the Times article or the Sanders and Khanna press release?
The story adds depth and context to PW’s coverage of the proposed California tax. Ira is an expert on the Times and he returns to the beat here:
One billionaire wealth pool that Sanders and Khanna and the Times’s intrepid investigative journalists don’t seem eager to shine a light on is the New York Times Company itself, whose stock today traded at a price above $81 a share, a record. Leave it to the people with inherited sixth-generation family control of a company with a $12.4 billion enterprise value and political agenda-setting power that, if sharply diminished, remains significant to sound a panicky alarm about the creation of new fortunes.
The funniest thing about the Times billionaire article is the undertone of old-money horror at the arrivistes. “The number of U.S. billionaires jumped 50 percent by some estimates between 2017 and 2025, to more than 900 people,” the Times frets, fulminating about “stunning velocity” and the “colossal leap.” At pro-growth widely read news websites, we call that the American dream of upward mobility and opportunity. Celebrate it rather than complain about it.
If you have any interest in this issue, you will want to read the whole thing here.
